OSS in Developing Countries Bulletin, 2003

[Apr 1, 2004] http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/04/01/collabnet/ "But the open-source community has been doing  outsourcing since the beginning."

CHENNAI, India -- In an auditorium on the Chennai campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Brian Behlendorf is stumping before 200 engineering students. The pony-tailed founder and CTO of the Silicon Valley start-up CollabNet is here, ostensibly, to talk about open-source software. The event has been organized by the Indian Linux Users Group-Chennai; the 30-year-old Behlendorf, who  coordinated the growth of the hugely successful Apache Web server  project in its early days, is one of the heroes of the open-source  movement.

But he's also an executive of an American company that has outsourced a significant part of its operations to India, placing him at the center of the firestorm that has erupted in the United States over the globalization of white-collar jobs. So he can't avoid addressing the  issue of what has really brought him to the subcontinent, even as he  adds his own unique twist to the debate.

"Outsourcing is a sensitive topic in the U.S. for political reasons,"  Behlendorf says. "But the open-source community has been doing  outsourcing since the beginning." Programs like Apache and Linux and many others, he argues, were developed by thousands of volunteers from around the globe -- an example of massively outsourced labor. In a
sense, the move by Western corporations to outsource programming operations to developing nations isn't just about cutting costs, it's about adopting a new software development model.

Behlendorf's audience is receptive to his remarks. It is made up of students from one of India's most elite engineering institutions -- a school that's harder to get into than Harvard, a school so competitive that its tens of thousands of applicants are known as "aspirants." The men, who make up the majority, are dressed in button-down oxfords and belted khakis, the women in flowing salwar kameez. There's only a smattering of geeky T-shirts: "2001 Welcome to Linux: It's now safe to turn on your computer," reads one.

After Behlendorf has finished speaking, the students come up to the podium to pepper him with questions. When he finally leaves the stage, a dozen engineers follow him out into the humid night, intent on spending every possible moment with him until he disappears into the car that will take him back to his $130-a-night room at the Sheraton. Then, the students walk away into the dark, a loose group scattered below a jumbled canopy of banyan, neem, mango, tamarind and eucalyptus trees populated by dangling wild monkeys.

Behlendorf isn't here in Chennai for the second time in 10 months just to spread the open-source gospel. He's here because the boom in offshoring is resulting in a tight labor market -- in India. In the topsy-turvy logic of globalization, it's Behlendorf who's here to court the engineers: highly educated, technical talent that costs a fraction of what it commands in the U.S. Recruiting such talent is becoming an ever more competitive endeavor for companies looking to join the offshore flood.

In the U.S., the rush to outsource labor internationally is increasingly being seen by workers as an us-vs.-them zero-sum game. As they watch one corporate behemoth after another -- IBM, GE, Oracle, HP, Google -- send  significant portions of their operations offshore, their agitation is burgeoning into a political hot-button issue. According to a new Gallup Poll, 58 percent of Americans say that outsourcing will be "very important" when they decide their votes for president. And 61 percent say that they are concerned that they, a friend or a relative might lose  a job because the employer is moving work to a foreign country.

Analysts' estimates that 3.3 million jobs are likely to be lost to outsourcing by 2015, and that 14 million are vulnerable to foreign competition, have turned India into the new Japan in the imagination of American workers: an ominous economic threat to their livelihoods.

Despite assurances from economists that the furor is so much protectionist alarmism, the nagging question remains: How can you compete with a worker who makes a 10th of your salary?

But for Behlendorf and CollabNet, the outsource-or-not-to-outsource challenge is no cut-and-dried case of greedy American corporations sending jobs overseas. Behlendorf, as befits his open-source roots, is an idealist. Taking a global perspective, he believes that spreading the wealth internationally is good for the world in the long run. He and his fellow executives want CollabNet to be a truly global company, with no distinction made between employees in one country or another. But even more to the point, CollabNet's main product, SourceCast, is a set of software tools that facilitate development among teams of programmers working in different locations.

In other words, CollabNet's developers, both in the U.S. and India, are hard at work writing code that makes it easier for workers on opposite sides of the globe to work together effectively. CollabNet even "eats its own dogfood," as the saying goes, using its main product as the development environment for writing the SourceCast code.

One important market for SourceCast: corporations that outsource.

[Jan 01, 2004] whump.com More Like This WebLog Open Source and Outsourcing

I want to gently respond to Robert Scoble's post about offshoring and Open Source:

I find it ironic that Slashdot is worrying about offshoring of programming. These are the same folks who cheer everytime a country like Israel or China chooses to go with free software over software written in America that costs money. Nice to know they care.

At a high level, you we can state that offshoring and choosing open source software are driven by first-order optimization: it may be, in some cases, cheaper to use Linux or outsource work overseas.

However, I don't think the comparison holds up that well.

Much of what's outsourced is 'commodity' work. Even if the projects were written in C# rather than Perl, that work would go overseas.

China and Israel's choice to use Open Source over Microsoft tools means that for those decision makers, the Open Source value proposition is better than Microsoft's, Apple's, SCO's, or HP's (to name a few vendors.)

I don't see offshoring going away unless eXtreme Programming and other rapid methodologies are adopted by IT organizations, and are demonstrated as less expensive than outsourcing 'traditional' methods.

However, there's a market for platforms, and Microsoft, Apple, and Open Source compete.

Robert, if Microsoft wants China, then Longhorn, as software you buy, has to be more compelling then good old grubby command line and scary window manager Linux. But regardless of if it's developed in .Net, J2EE, Project Builder, or LAMP, most likely we'll see most IT work developed in China and India.

Outsourcing and the global IP devaluation

In a widely quoted study, Baruch Lev of the Brookings Institution reported that in 1982, 62% of the market value of companies in the S & P 500 Index could be attributed to tangible assets, and only 38% to intangibles. By 1992, Lev noted, the ratio had essentially reversed: 32% of the assets for S & P companies were tangible, while 68% were intangible. A follow-up study by Brookings in 1998 reported that the asset ratio had shifted even more, with 85% of assets intangible, and only 15% tangible.

While similar findings have been pointed to in hundreds of journals and reports, few observers have made the connection to the fact that the devaluation of U.S. intellectual property is directly linked to the widespread export of information technology jobs to foreign countries.

Our haste to embrace globalization is one of the clearest culprits. In the name of globalization, the U.S. has relentlessly pursued business partnerships with countries that are home to relentless intellectual property theft. It almost seems as though the more evidence there is of piracy in a country, the more information technology business and investment we bring in. The relationship is simple: unpunished theft of intellectual property, coupled with IT and IP globalization, has exponentially increased the overall amount of IP theft. Simply put, the more there is to steal, the more will be stolen. While many would argue that intellectual property theft abroad does not have a significant impact on our economy, the math provides the grim truth. If 85% of the assets of the Standard Poor 500 shrinks by even 1% percentage point, it devalues U.S. corporations by billions of dollars.

When Think Tanks Attack

Re:Wasting money on Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 23, @08:20AM (#9505546)

The one that says that an average Malaysian worker has to work 1,100 (yes, eleven hundred) hours to buy a licensed copy of Windows XP. The same worker would also have to work roughly 11,000 hours to buy a standard PC not to mention various peripheral devices.

Re:Wasting money on Open Source? (Score:3, Interesting) by Viceice (462967) on Wednesday June 23, @11:15AM (#9507396)

That's pushing it. I'm Malaysian, and as far as wages go, I'd say that 1100 hours for a copy of XP is pushing it unless you are hardcore poor. Working at a fast-food joint (there is forever a vacancy) in Malaysia will pay rm 3.50 an hour + benefits and workers fund ( 10 % of your pay is deducted for workers fund, and the company adds another 20% to it). A licensed copy of windows purchased with a PC is about rm 350. So if you are a teen working at say KFC and you spend all of your take home pay on the licensed copy of windose, it's about 110 hours. But you'll have a hell of a time convincing the kid why he should give his hard earned money to a super rich monopoly when he can buy Windows off the street for rm 5. It's hard, that's why in Malaysia, the (F*ing) BSA only raids companies and all anti piracy FUD are not targeted at home users. I'm sure if they started suing, people would rather ditch them and use Linux then pay MS.

Re:Wasting money on Open Source? (Score:1) by scratchbuild (651760) on Wednesday June 23, @12:17PM (#9508288)

Wow. That number didn't look right, so I had to dig up my copy of Wired. Here are the stats: Price of Windows in the World: (Country : Hours worked) Japan: 9 USA: 13 Chile: 94 South Korea : 176 Russia : 219 China (urban) : 390 Ukraine : 510 BANGLADESH : 1106 MALAWI : 1658 According to the Malaysian Department of Statistics [statistics.gov.my], the Gross National Income per Capita for Malaysia is RM 14838. At RM3.8 = US$1, that works out to around US $ 2 per hour. So it would cost a Malaysian 150 hours for a US$300 copy of Windows XP Pro. Of course, the issue is that a copy of Windows XP goes for about US$5 at any half decent shopping mall around here. ^_^

Re:Wasting money on Open Source? (Score:5, Interesting) by Daengbo (523424) <faengoy@y[ ]o.com ['aho' in gap]> on Wednesday June 23, @08:48AM (#9505778) (http://slashdot.org/~Daengbo/journal/ | Last Journal: Friday June 18, @11:03AM)

This is the reason that pirated software flourishes in SE Asia and China. People just don't make enough money. For instance, I did a lot of promotion of LinuxTLE in Thailand. A complete computer with it installed will cost about 11,000 Baht (~US$270), but the equivalent computer with XP and MS OFfice is 27K+. For the entry level college grad, this is over three months' salary!. For the average programmer, it is about two and a half months' salary. People find it easy to justify the piracy when numbers like these come in, and it leads to the `95% piracy rate. Compare this with Korea, where I live now. Almost every computer that I see is licensed properly, and running XP or ME. MSOffice is not popular, but a competitor, HanWord, is. Korea has the twelveth largest economy in the world (I've heard), and people make a salary approximately on par with the US. It is, however, a stone's throw from China, where the piracy is legendary.

Re:Wasting money on Open Source? (Score:1, Troll) by mumblestheclown (569987) on Wednesday June 23, @09:18AM (#9506083)

Introduction: The wired article is full of shit. Support: The Malaysia per capita GDP is around US $10k. (Source: CIA World Fact Book) Conclusion: The wired article is full of shit.

Re:Concerns: government wasting money on open sour (Score:5, Interesting) by LaCosaNostradamus (630659) <LaCosaNostradamu ... m ['mai' in gap]> on Wednesday June 23, @10:05AM (#9506624) (Last Journal: Sunday September 21, @12:32PM)

Get some facts before ranting to the extent you did. The pro-wealthy weighting of America's tax system isn't fashion, it's fact. The tax system in America is so Byzantine that the wealthy and corporate take monstrous advantage of it time and time again. This is opposed to the wage-earner who is assaulted by a mandatory system he can't afford to escape through the hiring of a tax accountant. For instance, can YOU (British even so) park your assets offshore while parking your expenses onshore, escaping taxation while also piling deductions under your tax system? Can YOU pay a relative 1% fee to a tax accountant to draft an opinion letter outlining how all that asset movement is legal? Can YOU move compensation from tax-deferred instrument to tax-free account, eventually escaping all taxation on it? Can YOU escape taxation by being so diversely embodied that you simply end up paying yourself? Enron (an egregious example, certainly) managed to use the tax system so well -- creating almost 900 partnerships for tax-dodging purposes -- that for the last 5 years of its existence, it had no yearly tax liability for 4 of them. Just because a middle-class person can rack up enormous debts and play a little with his income tax return, doesn't mean that the wealthy and corporate aren't escaping away with billions. As a Brit, you may find the book dreadfully dull due to its American focus, but go out right now and obtain: "Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else" by David Cay Johnston As far as I'm concerned, exposees like Johnston's only illustrate that the American tax system is arranged for the collapse of the American Empire. The complexity, and lack of enforcement in fixing it, are fatal wounds. When tax frauds can happen much, much faster than they can be stopped, then tax frauds will become the usual. When tax dodges can happen for the wealthy equivalent of pocket change, and the very mentality of fraud settles in, then eventually the wealthy will pay no taxes. P.S. I own no stock and voluntarily participate in no benefits program (a la 401(k)) of any kind ... thanks for asking, Ace.

Re:Concerns: government wasting money on open sour (Score:5, Insightful) by ctr2sprt (574731) on Wednesday June 23, @09:53AM (#9506473)

Don't be too cynical. Well, maybe you should be cynical, but about something else. The US Tax Code is enormous. It's written by a bunch of people with totally different ideas of economics, and it shows. It gets longer and more complex almost every year. It's like if 1500 people wrote one computer program over the span of a hundred years with no real direction where no old code is ever really deleted. (Instead, new code is written to selectively ignore or enforce previous code.) The end product is millions of lines of code long, and no one person who contributed to it has any grasp of the entire picture. People spend years and years studying your program just to understand what it does, and they become very wealthy explaining it to the rest of us. And even then, most of them only understand one relatively narrow aspect of it. Starting to understand now how those loopholes come into effect? Even worse, think about what happens when a loophole that's being widely exploited is shut down. It works out to the same thing as a tax increase, and you know how Americans feel about those. Which is why so many genuinely accidental loopholes become permanent parts of the tax code. And the loopholes work both ways, like the now-gone "marriage penalty" (where a married couple pay more in taxes than they would filing separately). Those loopholes tend to last forever too, because tax reform - even tax reform that reduces the overall tax burden on a popular demographic - never plays as well as tax cuts. And if there's one thing politicians love, it's spending my money.

the good text (Score:5, Insightful) by mandalayx (674042) * <[email protected] minus painter> on Wednesday June 23, @08:00AM (#9505404) (http://www.ralphlee.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday June 05, @09:29AM)

the good text is at the bottom, imho. start here: They have a word in Washington for the corporate-sponsored outcry, the grassroots movement that isn’t: AstroTurf. By far the most comical example of this is to be found at the Freedom to Innovate Network (Fin), a “non-partisan, grassroots network of citizens and businesses who have a stake in the success of Microsoft and the high-tech industry”. Fin doesn’t try particularly hard to appear independent—its website, after all, is housed on Microsoft’s own—but it has as its online centrepiece a lengthy collection of testimonials from activist groups with vaguely alarming names: the Centre for the Moral Defence of Capitalism, Frontiers of Freedom, Defenders of Property Rights. Their comments appear unsolicited and independent: it certainly looks like there is a groundswell of support for the beleaguered computer giant. In the spirit of fair use, visit the website for the full story. It's interesting but don't take it as a rallying cry. Just remember to wonder why you see a think tank write a paper next time. In fact remember to wonder why the next person you see says something, in general.

[Jun 10, 2004] CNN.com - Microsoft to emerging markets We've got a deal for you -  Company moving beyond once-price-fits-all strategy

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- The long-running legal battles between Microsoft Corp. and governments in Europe and the United States make the company look like a partner in a bad marriage, ready to walk out and call the divorce lawyer.

But in Southeast Asia, the software giant seems more like an ardent suitor, wooing governments with sweet promises and gifts -- such as unprecedented bargain prices on its Windows operating system.

Microsoft executives suggest that pricing policies for government-promoted PC sales pioneered last year in Thailand and used again in Malaysia this year presage a new marketing approach for emerging markets.

So far, the localized versions consist of Windows XP minus English language support. The company also has hinted that it's developing a kind of "XP Lite," a leaner Windows with features more appropriate to developing countries where "high tech" is not a reality of everyday life.

Microsoft executives are themselves being lean with details, citing competitive strategy. But they're willing to discuss the concept.

"This is a new market with very different needs, from an economic perspective, from a social perspective, from a technical perspective," Barry Goff, group product manager for Windows Client group, said in a telephone interview from company headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Setting prices based on geography is not new in other industries. Pharmaceutical firms charge lower prices in developing markets like Africa than in mature ones like the United States. Even McDonald's sets different prices for Big Macs based on geography.

'Beginning of a trend'

But the software industry is just beginning to move beyond a one-price-fits-all strategy.

Besides Microsoft, Symantec Corp. in May released a Thai version of its Norton antivirus suite for half the price of its regular English edition. And earlier this month, Sun Microsystems Inc. introduced a government pricing scheme for its enterprise software based on population and degree of development, as determined by the United Nations.

"What we're seeing is the beginning of a trend," said Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research. "The more companies test the waters, the more of a trend there is because of the competitive threat."

Microsoft changed its tune a year ago.

The software giant previously promoted a one-price-fits-all policy: A shopkeeper in northern Thailand, for example, would be charged the same for his copy of Windows as a corporate lawyer in New York, despite the disparity in average national incomes.

Microsoft had little incentive to do otherwise as it commands the market. At the same time, lax enforcement of intellectual property laws throughout the region meant that many home users -- and not a few companies -- used pirated versions of Microsoft software.

When Thailand's Information and Communications Technology Ministry last year launched a program to boost the country's modest installed base of home computers by selling machines at a rock-bottom price, it asked Microsoft to help out.

To keep to its targeted price of the equivalent of about $260 for a fully equipped desktop computer, the ministry sought a discount on the company's software.

No deal, said Microsoft.

Convinced that price rather than feature set was the key to success, the ministry went ahead and began marketing its computers in May 2003, bundling them with freely distributed but less user friendly "open source" software: a Thai language version of the Linux operating system and an office productivity suite.

Special pricing

Within a month, the ministry had more than 100,000 orders in hand. And it also had the attention of Microsoft, which came back with an offer the ministry couldn't refuse.

"Microsoft offered a special price of 1,500 baht ($38) for XP Home and Office XP combined," recalled Jumrud Sawangsamud, chairman of affordable computing working committee. Normally, Windows XP Home Edition sold for 4,500 baht and Office XP cost 15,000 baht.

The only thing lacking, said Thai and Microsoft officials, was English-language in the Windows displays -- menus and such -- to discourage exports to outside markets.

The success of the program allowed the ICT Ministry to move on to new promotions with Microsoft's participation, such as the sale of cut-rate notebook computers to civil servants.

Microsoft now touts its original Thai deal as a model for emerging markets.

When Malaysia's Ministry of Energy, Communications and Multimedia announced a similar project to boost the number of computers in rural households, Microsoft got in on the ground floor.

Purchasers of Malaysia's PC Gemilang: PC Mampu Beli -- "Glorious PC: Affordable PC" -- can buy machines loaded with open source software, for 988 ringgit, or $260. Or they can opt for a desktop loaded with a Malaysian-language only version of Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition and the lightweight Works suite for 1,147 ringgit, or $302.

Vietnam, which announced a similar large-scale, low-cost computer project, is a likely candidate for a similar deal and has been in discussions with Microsoft since late last year. Ngo Phuc Cuong, Microsoft's chief representative in Vietnam, declined to give further details.

Piracy prevention

It's clear the rise of piracy in Southeast Asia and the low cost of open source alternatives are spurring Microsoft's new approach.

The company said the initiative was geared mostly for developing countries, and that it was meant to fend off advances by Linux. But Linux poses little immediate threat to Windows on consumer desktops.

Even when Thailand was rolling out its cheap Linux PCs last year, officials assumed that a substantial number of them would be reconfigured with pirated copies of Windows.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance, a multi-industry lobbying group, estimates 72 percent of the business software used in Thailand last year was pirated. For Malaysia, the figures were 68 percent, while Vietnam tied with Russia as the world's worst, at 93 percent.

Microsoft's Goff characterized the program as an opportunity to fulfill the company's vision of "a PC on every desktop and in every home."

"From a ... First World perspective, we've largely succeeded in that," he said. "But Microsoft is truly a global organization, and if you really think about globally, 'Have we succeeded?' the answer is 'Not even close."'

[Mar 26, 2004] NewsForge Constraints against the adoption and use of FOSS in developing countries

Many people have called for the increased adoption of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in developing countries in general, and in Africa in particular. The reasons center around issues of affordability, ownership, and openness. Although the use of FOSS in developing countries is increasing, a number of constraints still stifle the growth of FOSS use in these countries. The constraints are many and varied, but can be grouped into five, namely: the nature of FOSS itself, an adverse policy environment, lack of marketing, inadequate technical support, and lack of trained personnel.

Background

The use of FOSS has, in the past decade or so, seen an explosive growth around the world, thanks to factors such as the increasing popularity of the GNU/Linux operating system, the growth of the Internet, and the availability of FOSS alternatives to proprietary applications.

The freedoms and associated affordability of FOSS makes it particularly attractive to people looking for alternatives to relatively expensive, restrictive, and insecure proprietary software. This is especially so for people in developing countries because they have few resources to spend on computers and software. For this reason, many developing countries such as Brazil, India, Vietnam, South Africa, Malaysia, and Thailand, to name a few, are increasingly leaning toward adopting FOSS.

In Brazil, for example, the Federal government has published its Free Software implementation guidelines, and aims for at least 80% of computers purchased by government in 2004 having FOSS. In the same vein, the Indian government has launched a Linux India Initiative to support resource centers and localization projects. Malaysia is launching OSS reference center to manage OSS implementation, and its Ministry of Finance has provided venture capital funds to Malaysian OSS companies.

In Africa, South Africa has taken the lead in the drive for greater adoption of FOSS. The South African government recently published a policy paper which called for using FOSS in preference to their proprietary equivalents if both types of software had comparable features. The South African FOSS community has launched Impi, its own Linux distribution. In addition, many educational institutions in South Africa use FOSS to increase access to computers and to the Internet, thereby helping bridge the digital divide that slows the pace of development and reduces the capacity of developing countries to effectively use development assistance.

Despite the obvious benefits of FOSS and its increasing popularity worldwide, there persist a number of problems that constrain its adoption and use in developing countries.

Nature of FOSS

To paraphrase the cartoon character Pogo, we have met the enemy of increased adoption and use of FOSS in developing countries, and the enemy is FOSS. The very nature of FOSS generally makes it inaccessible or difficult for many people to use. FOSS is generally not user-friendly, and require higher than average technical skills to make use of. It is perhaps for this reason that while Linux is a popular platform for servers, and workstations, it has yet to become as popular as Microsoft Windows as a desktop environment.

The reasons for the lack user-friendliness of FOSS are varied but center around greater reliance on a command line rather than a graphical user interface, and poor user-interface design. In consequence, FOSS applications generally require greater technical skills to use than the point-and-click menu-driven user interface on Windows.

Poor documentation is another major constraint to the adoption and use of FOSS in both developed and developing countries. End-user documentation is of critical importance to the user-friendliness of an application, and in this regard, FOSS has a long way to go. Most FOSS applications lack proper end-user documentation, if they have it all. OpenOffice.org, for example, a leading FOSS office productivity suite, has a Web site dedicated to its documentation, but the documentation is rather scanty. Although efforts are underway to address the situation, the problem certainly hinders the widespread adoption of OpenOffice.org.

Another problem with FOSS documentation is that although packages are translated into different languages, the translations are usually restricted to the menu items, commands, and user interfaces. Seldom are user manuals, if they exist at all, translated. In addition, while developers often know enough English to write computer programs, some of them cannot write useful end-user documentation, thus reducing the user-friendliness of the applications they develop, no matter how good they are.

Adverse policy environment

Many developing countries have yet to articulate national information and communications technology (ICT) policies on such issues as privacy, strategies, and approaches to ICT development. Lack of policy on FOSS is a specific aspect of this general problem of lack of ICT policy in many developing countries. For this reason, many developing countries do not have policies on the use of FOSS by government agencies, and their service providers. In other cases, they have policy environments that at best are neutral, or at worse, hostile to the adoption and use of FOSS.

This situation is especially debilitating to FOSS because in many developing countries the government is the largest single buyer of ICT products and services. Furthermore, a favorable government policy on FOSS is frequently a major boost to the adoption and use of FOSS because it would justify spending on FOSS.

Another adverse policy effect on the adoption and use of FOSS in developing countries is that many government and donor agencies insist on proprietary software when they invite bids to provide ICT products and services. It is thus not uncommon to find advertisements that specifically ask for computers pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows and Office, rather than stipulating the required functionalities of the computers to be provided.

Donor agencies, either by omission or commission, also frequently hinder the adoption and use of FOSS in developing countries. Again, the problem emanates from the insistence of many donor agencies on proprietary software, and a failure to adopt a more pro-FOSS policy in their assistance programs. Furthermore, the lukewarm attitude of developed countries to FOSS in the ongoing World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process seriously hampers the adoption of FOSS in developing countries.

This lack of commitment by the donor community to the increased use of FOSS in developing countries is especially unfortunate because governments in many developed countries are turning to FOSS and curtailing their use of proprietary software. The UK government, for example, in a 2002 published a policy paper that among other things called for using products that support open standards, and avoiding being locked into proprietary IT products and services, while the European Commission has called for promoting the use of OSS in government. Given that more and more developed countries are opting for FOSS, it makes sense for donor agencies (e.g. the Department for International Development (DFID) in the UK) to have a more pro-FOSS policy in their development assistance programs.

International development organizations and agencies have also yet to promulgate and implement pro-FOSS policies. Despite the fact that a number of UN agencies, such as the UNDP and UNESCO, provide support to the FOSS community, they have yet to articulate specific guidelines on the use of FOSS in their assistance programs, or indeed within their organizations themselves. Although UNESCO has a vibrant FOSS portal and the UNDP actively supports the International Open Source Network (IOSN), there are no indications that they plan to migrate to FOSS anytime soon.

Lack of marketing

Like any product, FOSS needs adequate and effective marketing if it is to have a large following. This is especially so in developing countries, given that many products competing against FOSS are backed by rich multi-national companies that have large marketing programs and budgets. In contrast, FOSS packages generally do not have any marketing budget whatsoever, and depend only on the loyalty of their user base to spread the word.

Another advantage proprietary packages like Microsoft Windows enjoy over FOSS is that many large proprietary software companies have, or are associated with, non-profit activities. The large grants given out by the Gates Foundation create a lot of goodwill for Microsoft products, even though the Gates Foundation is independent of the company.

Furthermore, proprietary software companies often provide their products at deeply discounted prices to educational institutions and non-governmental organizations (NGO), thereby reducing the price advantage FOSS has over proprietary products and locking these institutions into proprietary solutions. This is especially true in developing countries because they frequently rely on donated computers and software packages to equip computer labs in educational institutions. For this reason, many students in developing countries grow up on Microsoft products, and have to make an extra effort to take up FOSS.

Inadequate technical support

Lack of technical support is another problem that stifles the adoption and use of FOSS in developing countries. Many FOSS applications (especially Free Software) are provided on an as-is basis, and developers provide little end-user technical support. In some cases, commercial support for FOSS packages is provided by their developers, along with other companies and individuals. In the main, however, technical support for most FOSS applications is provided by Internet communities via Web sites and e-mail discussions.

Almost all FOSS packages have their own Web communities and these, by and large, provide effective technical support. However, the quality of support for a FOSS product is highly variable and dependent on its stage of development, user base, and the language in which support is desired. As a rule of thumb, the longer a package has been under development and the larger its user base, the better the quality of support. In addition, English-speaking users, in general, get much better support than people who speak other languages, simply because English is the de facto official language of the Internet.

Despite the many advantages of Internet-based support for FOSS, this type of support is not ideal for many people in developing countries. The digital divide between industrialized and developing countries is also manifested in the cost and ease of access to the Internet. Given that many people in developing countries do not have adequate and affordable Internet access, if any at all, the Internet is not the ideal way to provide technical support to FOSS users in developing countries.

Another way in which FOSS users are provided support is via the many user and interest groups around the world. Many of these groups are vibrant communities that commonly have superb expertise among their ranks. However, the few in developing countries generally have fewer resources than their counterparts in developed countries. For this reason, user groups in developing countries are not as able as their counterparts in developed countries to provide adequate technical support to FOSS users.

Lack of trained personnel

Lack of trained personnel is another major impediment to the adoption and use of FOSS in developing countries. Most developing countries do not have enough adequately trained people in many technical fields, especially in ICTs. The problem of lack of trained ICT personnel in developing countries is worse in the case of FOSS because many training programs are based on proprietary systems and software, such as Microsoft Windows.

Any attempt to address the shortage of FOSS users and developers in developing countries also must deal with the problem of lack of standardization of FOSS training and certification programs. While Microsoft and other proprietary software providers have clearly defined certification programs, there exist few well-known FOSS equivalents. Furthermore, the fact that fewer people know of FOSS than of Microsoft products means that even fewer people know of FOSS certification programs than Microsoft certifications. The net result is that few people choose to pursue FOSS training and certification.

Local FOSS user groups and communities are an important resource for acquiring FOSS education and skills. To the extent that many developing countries lack vibrant local FOSS communities, they are also denied the valuable educational services these communities provide. For many people, a local Linux install fest is the first opportunity to dip their toes into FOSS. As such, the fact that few developing countries support vibrant FOSS communities means that not many people in developing countries can benefit from training provided by these user groups.

These five factors are the major constraints against the use of FOSS in developing countries. In part two, we will suggest some solutions to these constraints.

Katim S. Touray is an independent media and Internet consultant based in The Gambia, West Africa.  He holds a Ph.D. in Soil Science from the University of Wisconsin.

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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Last modified: March 12, 2019